I FOUGHT 6 YEARS TO GIVE 'MANGIONISTAS' THE RIGHT TO SAY 'FUCK BRIAN THOMPSON' AND I'D DO IT AGAIN
LUIGI MANGIONE CASE INSPIRES FIRECE DEBATE ABOUT WHAT A JOURNALIST IS AND WHAT RIGHTS THEY SHOULD HAVE TO SPEAK AND REPORT
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MALONE, NEW YORK MAY 19, 2026 Opinion
They still don't get it.
250 years after America's birth, they still don't get the First Amendment to our Constitution (adapted 1791) when it unequivocally commands: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ..."
Luigi Mangione shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson to death outside the Hilton hotel in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024. It was a political assassination. When he was busted in Altoona, Pennsylvania a week later Mangione had a note in his backpack saying "Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming."
The note charges health insurance corporations with continuing “to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it."
The case attracted international attention. It also sparked much-needed debate about America's reliance on a for-profit health care system instead of a free, public health care system.
Both the State of New York and the Federal Government are prosecuting Mangione as if he killed a president. As the case wound its way through the courts, three supporters coalesced into a group. Ashley Rojas, Abril Rios and Lena Weissbrot call themselves the "Mangionistas," which is also their Instagram account.
They are best understood as social media influencers or bloggers—with a dash of street theater.
The Mangionistas were talented and creative enough to secure official press credentials issued by the City of New York.
Gothamist, under co-publisher Jake Dobkin with editors John del Signore and Christopher Robbins, was the first blog to be credentialed by the NYPD in 2012. They said it took eight years to convince the NYPD they were real journalists. When social media was spawned and influencers became a thing, they were credentialed under the relatively expansive criteria established by the Gothamist fight.
But getting a press credential, and keeping a press credential, were and remain two very different things—as we shall soon see. For now, though, back to the Mangionistas.
On Monday, Rojas, Rios and Weissbrot stood outside Manhattan Criminal Court where Mangione was scheduled to appear proudly wearing their NYC-issued press credentials.
Molly Crane-Newman has been a court reporter for the New York Daily News for a while. She knows a story when she sees one. When she saw the Mangionistas standing there, flaunting their New York City (read: Mayor Zohran Mamdani)-issued press credentials, she smelled blood in the water. Like a shark. I worked at those courts for 20 years. I would have smelled it too.
Not only was it sexy, it was easy.
Molly: "So are you reporting on this trial?"
Rojas: "Yeah. We act as press. Since it's very obvious that legacy media has some sort of agenda against Luigi Mangione, and his supporters."
Rojas added: "And we're here to prove that we have the power as the people to get the public informed."
Weisbrott gave the whole thing some color.
"Other countries have had revolutions for far less," she declared. "We're pretty much the most cucked and submissive in all of human history."
"And I'm tired of it," she added. "Its time for everyone to grow some fucking balls."
What was really wonderful about that was, when Weissbrot said "balls," Rojas did too and they hit a fucking harmony.
Molly hit gold. She kept digging. "What was that? I didn't get that?"
Rojas: "Fuck Brian Thompson. I don't give a flying fuck he died."
When Molly Tweeted video of it all, condemnation was swift.
Mostly from MAGA (the same people who justify ransacking Congress. Congress!), but also from many mainstream journalists lamenting the fact people with strong opinions could be issued official press credentials by the City. Many of these openly yearned for ye olden times past when the NYPD controlled who got press credentials and who didn't.
For example. Craig McCarthy, the New York Post's City Hall Bureau Chief, whined "Another issue with taking press credentials away from NYPD." Gothamist's Clayton Guse—betraying his publication’s proud history of fighting for the First Amendment (under new management since 2021)—Tweeted "City press badges have turned into souvenirs."
Tom Winter, NBC's "National Law Enforcement & Intelligence" correspondent, admitted he's been snitching, trying to convince government officials to restrict who qualifies for a city-issued press credential: "This is going to end badly and what’s worse is that whenever I have raised this with City Council members they either ignore or blame others as if they don’t have a vote."
Pearl-clutching ninnies, the lot of them.
It's predictable the Post and a cop beat reporter would want the cops to gate-keep press credentials. But that left-leaning journalists (Guse wasn't the only one Tweeting pathetic, reactionary bullshit, Aristide Economopolous) would also publicly support additional restrictions on city-issued press credentials is sad, disturbing but also par for the course: the cancelling Left hasn’t exactly been a friend of the First Amendment lately.
By the end of the day, the Karen choir convinced Mayor Mamdani to declare the mayor's office was “reassessing the city’s process and standards for press credentialing.” Even if he's not serious and it was just a failed attempt at tactical public relations (that backfired and produced a New York Times metro headline instead), the fact the mayor's office gave the fake complaints legitimacy is itself bullshit.
I say "Fuck No" to the NYPD controlling press credentials.
When the NYPD controlled press credentials they censored news reporting in New York City. Cops put their hands over camera lenses, regularly. If you complained, you got arrested and the NYPD took "their" press credential back. They did it to me, many times.
Everyone knows the NYPD regularly did this. Everyone who worked on the street anyway, instead of an air conditioned office.
I wasn't the only one the NYPD censored. Every news photographer who worked in New York City for the first 20 years of the 21st Century can tell you multiple war stories about it. It started under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and it continued under Mayors Mike Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio until I stopped it in 2021.
It was not just news photographers the NYPD censored either.
Famously, Newsday's cop reporter Leonard Levitt was even banned from NYPD headquarters. Levitt's reporting—reporting—pissed then-Commissioner Ray Kelly off so badly Kelly actually rode out to Newsday headquarters, on Long Island, with his armed bodyguards, and complained in person to the newspaper’s big wigs.
I've detailed my own experiences with the NYPD many times, including this 2020 opinion in Gothamist, so I won't repeat it in full here. In short, I was on assignment for the Daily News in 2015 when the NYPD took my press credential after I got photographs of an injured construction worker then-Mayor de Blasio's press office ordered the NYPD to stop me from getting.
Six years and a federal civil rights lawsuit later, the City agreed to completely reform the NYPD press credentialing process by guaranteeing journalists due process hearings if their press credentials are taken. The settlement also limited the reasons why a press credential can be taken to actual crimes and conduct that truly threatens public safety—instead of bruised police egos and hurt feelings.
None of these legal safeguards existed before my lawsuit.
When news broke of the new regulations the NYPD agreed to adopt to settle my lawsuit, somehow—this is really astonishing and, to me, infuriating—somehow an idiot New York Times columnist thought they were bad. I'll give this fool the benefit of the doubt and say it was because she'd never set foot on the street, so she didn't know how badly the NYPD sometimes treated journalists.
In any event, in history's only instance of the Times and the Post agreeing on anything, my handiwork somehow got them to agree the proposed new regulations were bad. (Which exposes their shared interests.) That motivated then-City Councilmember Keith Powers to propose a bill mandating the transfer of press credentialing from the NYPD to the Mayor's Office.
When the bill passed, the Mayor's Office adopted the exact same rules my settlement with the City required the NYPD to adapt to settle my lawsuit. I literally took the victory (and the money) and rode off into the motherfucking sunset—fly-fishing from New York to Maine and back before settling in the Adirondack mountains—like the goddamn hero I am.
That brings us back to Monday and the Mangionistas.
Rojas, Rios and Weissbrot can say whatever the fuck they want—thanks to me and the regulations I drafted the City is required to follow under my legal settlement with it. The opinion page of the newspaper doesn't stop being journalism because it expresses opinions. Same here. Even opinion reporters qualify for press credentials.
If Mayor Mamdami turned Trump and the City did try to take the Mangionistas’ press credentials, each of them would be legally entitled to a fair due process hearing before an administrative law judge. At that hearing, the City would have to prove they committed a crime or spoke words (1) intended by each of them to “incite or produce” (2) “imminent lawless action” that is (3) “likely to incite or produce such action"—the standard of proof demanded by the Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment decision in Brandenburg v Ohio (1969).
The Mangionistas weren’t arrested and there’s not even an arguable case “Fuck Brian Thompson” meets the extremely demanding Brandenburg standard.
If the City just ignored the rules and took their press credentials anyway, a 2019 decision by Federal Judge J. Paul Oetken in my lawsuit established clear legal precedent taking press credentials without a hearing violates not just the First but the Fourteenth Amendment too.
Finally, the settlement in my lawsuit also explicitly allows my lawsuit to be revived upon request: "the District Court shall continue to maintain jurisdiction over this action for the purpose of enforcing the terms of the settlement agreement ..."
You best believe if any fool fucks with my legacy I will come roaring down out of the mountains to set shit straight—once again.
So, class, repeat after me, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ..."
Send tips or corrections to jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me